Critical Thinking - Chapter 1
- Prominent Features
- Is reflective
- Involves standards (accuracy, relevance, depth etc)
- Is authentic
- Involves being reasonable
- Three components
- Asking questions
- The most difficult part of critical thinking: noticing that there are questions to ask
- Engaging with the questions we ask (the difference between an empty and a meaningful question lies in the spirit in which we ask it)
- A good question is one we really want an answer to
- Reasoning them out
- Not an answer we have always taken for granted and not thought about
- Not an impressionistic answer
- Not before gathering information
- Not according to how we were raised (without examining it)
- Not in accordance with our personality (without examining its influence on our reasoning)
- Not using reasoning to defend the first thing that comes to mind
- Rethinking the question, reformulating it in a more neutral way
- Noticing the resistance to doing it
- Two major obstacles
-Human spontaneous reaction
-Learned social responses
-Misunderstanding what reasoning means (not just any discussion or debate; different spirit)
-Not reasoning out WELL
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- Believing the results of our reasoning (internalizing them, acting) - the litmus test of critical thinking
-Resistance to internalizing them (What concepts am I bringing to bear?)
-Denial
-Four indicators:
- I feel strong emotions as I reason something out
- I end up believing contradictory things
- I believe very strongly and I don’t need reasons for the belief, it’s obvious
- My actions don’t follow my reasoning
- What Critical Thinking is NOT
- Not negative (critical – criteria)
- Not judgmental (although judgments are essential to critical thinking, and unavoidable)
- We can distance ourselves from negativity (getting away from childhood responses to negative feedback)
- Not emotionless (while some emotions get in the way, others enhance critical thinking, give us different kinds of data)
- Not disconnected from feelings
- Desires are the engine of critical thinking
- Not ONLY problem solving (it poses the very problem we want to solve)
- Impediments
- The news, movies, TV, advertising, magazines as our source of information about the world (distortion)
- Stereotyping, all or nothing, us versus them etc (reductive)
- Fears
- Some educational practices
- Deeper, more pervasive impediments
- Egocentrism
-Difficult to see it in ourselves
-Impediment to empathy
-Impediment to fair mindedness
-Impediment to looking at ourselves (and all that we identify as ‘us’) critically (with criteria)
-Impediment to seeing the big picture clearly (grades!)
- Developmental Patterns of Thinking
- Previous commitments, personal experience
-The importance of preponderance of evidence
-Personal experience: impediment, enhancer
-Limits of personal experience
-The importance of the data underlying any conclusion
- How deep is our need for critical thinking?
- Decision making
- Meaningfulness
- Concepts
- Our thinking, desires, emotions are based on concepts
- Concepts are culturally, socially, historically determined
- Reexamining concepts critically allows us to have healthier responses (opposite to denial)
- The experience of learning to think things through
- We will NOTfeel we are progressing
-We will slow down our thinking
-We will see questions we don’t have answers to
-We start second guessing ourselves
-Our bluff is called (I know exactly why, how …)
-We feel discouraged
-We are not able to apply critical thinking in practice
-We don’t know whether we are applying it correctly
-We feel confused when concepts overlap
-We feel we will never get there
-We go back and forth between certainty and doubt
-We feel we know less than before
-We feel the teacher is not doing a good job: she does not answer questions, make things obvious, pacify our anxiety
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